Why qualitative data, culture, community should be priorities at your media company

Editor’s note: INMA’s Data Insights Conference explored the practical steps media executives should take now to leverage data for significant audience and revenue growth. This video is one in a series showcasing the most important messages from the conference.

“For start-up companies to succeed, they constantly need to be testing their assumptions, their products, their hypothesis in the world, getting that data back, and iterating on that,” says Corey Ford, managing partner at San Francisco-based Matter.

How do these lessons apply to legacy media companies?

“A lot of these companies were built in a time when it was one to many broadcast.... Now we’re in this many to many world where there are lots of different networks and lots of different things can flow through those networks. So media to me is the connective tissue of society, and content may be what flows through it.”

* This week, INMA’s Silicon Valley Study Tour will take 34 news media executives from around the world on a five-day tour of 14 digital companies in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. We will visit Matter and Corey Ford on Monday. Stay tuned via INMA.org and our social media sites for updates.

About Dawn McMullan

Dawn McMullan is senior editor at INMA, based in Dallas, Texas, USA. She can be reached at dawn.mcmullan@inma.org.